The A4 H2O Case: A Game-Changer for Small Form Factor Builds

I'm very surprised at how low it is considering this is a founder's edition card. I was a little bit nervous at first that our rear-facing fan on the gpu would still be choked for airflow even though we are using those 20 millimeter standoffs, but it seems okay and this is of course without overclocking or any other modifications. It's gel toasty there, get a little tooasty but bear in mind this is without any fan tuning on the aio fans on the radiator fans and in the case like this a small form factor case it's very common uh to undervolt your cpu so that you can get those lower temperatures.

Sometimes you get some insane results like you can drop the cpu temps by 10 degrees or more without really incurring that much performance loss when it comes to frame rate especially in the game like this where it's more heavily gpu bound than anything. If this was my personal build I'd definitely try flipping the uh the radiator fans, oh and i'm about to get shot damn i'm making a bit you sons a bit uh anyway i would try flipping the radiator fans um for one i would definitely tune the fans uh to get a nice sweet spot between acoustics and uh and thermals and finally i would certainly undervolt the cpu because it's just getting a little too toasty for my liking as is on the gpu side of things I don't think I would change a thing um for a 3080 ti I don't really see any much point in overclocking it especially because we're not it's really not getting any uh sort of intake for it whatsoever, i mean the intake is just straight from the side of the side of the case it's getting it directly through the ventilation on the side panel but there's no actual fans in this case that's blowing fresh air towards the graphics card so I would probably just leave that alone.

I don't think there's any need to undervolt the gpu though unlike the cpu, just because the temperatures are just fine. They're looking really good, but yeah at the end of the day I really think this A4 H2O case is a huge step over the original dan case A4 simply because you just with that original case you would not be able to squeeze this level of power inside of such a small chassis, uh there's no way you could get uh certainly not an rtx 3080 or any 3000 series founders edition card in there because that again that rear fan would just be completely choked off. So I really appreciate the flexibility that this case offers over the original.

There's absolutely no way in hell I could ever cram a ryzen 9 5 900 x 12 core processor inside of the original dan case without shooting brakes, i mean there's just absolutely no way that's sustainable on a 90 millimeter radiator, just impossible. But in this case while the temperatures on the cpu do tend to get a little bit too high for my liking there's certainly room to tweak that and you can certainly bring those temperatures down by doing a number of those things that I suggested like overvolting or i'm sorry undervolting for example.

The end result is a very tiny but very fast pc, uh as you can see at 1440p at red dead redemption we're pretty much on ultra settings with dlss on balanced mode we're still getting over 100 fps on average which is pretty fantastic for a demanding game like this. As for acoustics the system is staying much quieter than I expected it to, it's still under full load running the same game um and I'll lean in so you can hear it on my mic Mike's right here, i'll back away this is ambient noise in the room and this is how it sounds from a more i guess realistic distance if I were playing a game right now it's a very scientific test going into this review.

I had a feeling that this case was going to be a huge upgrade over the original dan case A4, and I still stand by that opinion. I think it's a huge upgrade mainly because of the additional hardware support and honestly the the extra space that it takes up over the original case, I think it's well worth it uh considering how much more hardware you can cram into here and how much better cooling you can get as well uh particularly with your cpu so oh also just i gotta shout out again the price drop thank you liam lee and then case for dropping the price on this case and making it more competitive, I think it makes it a very compelling option for people who are looking to cram a lot of power into a very little space.

But you guys let me know what you think if you like this video toss a like on it before you go get subscribe for more tech content on the way, i will see you guys in the next video

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou see that big beautiful wall mounted pc right there it's a sexy beast right yeah yeah i know it looks good i built it with my own two hands is it fat of course it's fast it's blazing fast but today i have managed to cram about the same amount of power of that behemoth into this little guy right here the new case that we'll be checking out today proof that size doesn't matter or at least that's what i tell myself this portion of this video was sponsored by klarna kyra can you take out the trash yeah i'll i'll do it later do it now just pause the game i can't pause the game i said now sometimes later is better than now klarna is a free app in chrome extension that lets you buy now and pay later with clorna you can pay in the way that works best for you paying 4 lets you split the cost of a purchase into four interest-free payments pay in 30 days is a great option if you don't want to pay a cent until you've tried the product and decide to keep it or you can take advantage of their monthly financing option with over 250 000 partnered merchants you can use clarinet to shop at your favorite stores and automatically apply coupons and cashback rates at checkout so you never overpay again klarna's intuitive mobile app also lets you log in track your purchases pay in for anywhere and shop for deals to start saving and paying on your terms just click the link in the description to add clorna from any device kicks due to inactivity great great thanks mom you can unpause your game now that's not never mind thanks to kalona for sponsoring that part of my video now back to my regular content all righty here we go so this this case this is this is not a new case this is an old case this is the original dan case a4 and i used to really like this case this was my favorite one of my favorite small form factor cases in its day and when it first came out because for one it's just so tiny it's so so small and cute look at my whole hand the whole hand could fit on there it's a little baby i really like this case a lot because of how small it was it was very portable very compact i brought it everywhere ces my friend's place it was great the other thing i really liked about it is considering its size it actually fits some pretty decently sized hardware you could fit up to uh i think a 300 and something millimeter long gpu definitely full length gpu clearance here but there were some compromises to this case as well for example even though you could fit a lengthy gpu it was limited to two slots two slot design which i feel like you're gonna build something that's relatively high end two slots is is not really cutting it as much because we have a lot more cards that are more powerful that have beefier coolers on them so even if you have a two slot card and it's a fairly high end fairly powerful it probably has a beefy cooler on it that's wider than two slots maybe 2.5 or even three slots and so this case is very limited in that sense now with modern day gpus the other limitation that it had and i think this is the biggest one was cooling you could only fit up to a 90 millimeter radiator in here which is like what 90 millimeter aos do those even exist yes they do but they're not very common and there's not a lot of options for them and they're not very effective honestly you could really you really had to think about what cpu you were putting in here you couldn't push it too far because the cooling potential in this chassis was just so limited so fast forward to present day and dan cases and liam lee have teamed up once again to make this this is the a4 h2o essentially the successor to uh what i would call a legendary small form factor case in the pc world i'm very excited about this chassis i've been waiting for this case for a long time when they hit me up and said hey it's ready you want to check it out i hopped on the opportunity immediately what they've essentially done here is enlarge the case slightly in exchange for more hardware support so now we can fit up to a 240 millimeter radiator as well as triple slot gpus look at that pretty fancy now there's a few more cool things about this case that we'll get into later but i think personally based on those two improvements alone it's absolutely worth the size increase because even when you when you look at them side by side the original and the h2o they're not they're not that much different it's not that much bigger so it sounds slightly bigger on paper this is 7.25 liters going to 11.1 liters but when you look at them when you look at it it's not it's not that much bigger it's an inch wider that's probably the the most detrimental uh increase in size the height is maybe just shy of two inches taller which i don't think is going to bother most people just because height doesn't take up any more space on your desk and then it's pretty much exactly the same depth-wise it looks like the original is slightly less long at first but you can see that the the side panels actually protrude out past the top panel making them virtually the same depth so right off the bat i'm going to say that this was absolutely a fair trade and i would gladly take a slightly larger case for the added features that they've included here but of course we still have to do a build in this case just to make sure that nothing's weird and everything's working properly which is why i have all these parts flying around that that i'll be building with today but just random parts that i pulled off the shelf i wouldn't necessarily uh pair these all together if i was doing a personal build or whatever they're just kind of there to give us an idea of what it's like to build in this new chassis before i actually start building though i did want to give you guys a quick look at the outside of the case before we start diving in so for starters we have aluminum on the outside all these panels are aluminum and then we have a steel frame on the inside everything is very rigid feels very secure doesn't wobble or anything like that you've got a solid front panel right here no ventilation but you do have ventilation on the other three panels sides and top and they're all toollessly removable with the help of liam lee's push pin technology as was seen on the original design case they're very easy to pop off assuming that you're not filming with your other hand uh just pops off like that with the side panels though you do have two thumb screws on either side that you just remove first that's just for added security and then you also have front i o or left side i o i should say so you've got a power button up top feels feels nice and clicky we have usb type c and then we have audio jacks for mic and headphone as well as usb 3 type a on the back side you guys already had a peak of that but we'll take a look again you have a cutout for your motherboard and then three slots for your gpu so just like the original dam case this does use a riser cable so you can actually see it right there uh oh i'll talk more about the riser cable in just a second but uh you also have this motherboard tray that kind of intersects the case right in the middle so it sort of divides it up into two compartments just like the og case where you've got your motherboard and power supply on one side and your discrete gpu on the other up here we've got a pass through port for the power supply so obviously the power supply doesn't get mounted here it's actually sort of at the front on the left side of the chassis supports sfx and sfxl units i would suggest sfx non-l if you want additional room in there for managing cables and that sort of thing on the bottom of the case we have two rubber feet one two that span the entire width of the chassis which i really like i really like this look i know most people just won't give a second glance or like whatever kyle the rubber feet get over it but i think it just looks really clean and modern i hope this becomes a trend in my opinion it just looks a little cleaner than four individual feet and it also just i don't know it's probably just a placebo effect but it just makes the case feel a bit more planted on the desk and then finally we have this bottom portion here this is actually a removable panel um it's got a bunch of ventilation here and then we have four rubber anti-vibration pads where you can mount a two and a half inch uh ssd or hard drive obviously that would go on the inside of the case and that's pretty much the outside of the a4 h2o i think we're pretty much ready to build uh oh i guess i should mention pricing because i kind of have an idea of what this is going to cost they don't they didn't give me an exact number but they gave me a pretty close approximation so if you want the model with the gen 3 riser cable it's going to be anywhere between 120 to 130 us dollars and if you opt for the gen 4 cable assuming that you're going to go with a more modern day gpu then that's going to run you roughly 155 to 165 us which i think is fantastic it's a lot more competitive than what this case was originally priced at again i paid well over 200 for it back in the day they've dropped that down significantly i think they realize that the sff community the sff market has gotten a lot more competitive a lot more options out there than there were when this uh case first launched and so i think they're just taking note of that and and uh responding accordingly so you guys let me know what you think of the price though and the value of this case once this video is done on that note let's go ahead and start the build yes okie dokie we have the dan case mostly disassembled here with all four of the side panels removed we also have our motherboard assembled for the most part the only thing i left out is the water block of our aio i left that uninstalled because we're actually going to need to pass that through the top of the case and pass it through to the bottom in order to mount our radiator to the top and uh i should mention that radiator support is limited to 30 millimeters thick that just includes the radiator so you can do a 30 up to a 30 millimeter thick radiator and then 25 millimeter thick fans and that's pretty much the clearance that you have at the top so uh the other thing that i removed apart from the side panels was the psu cage so there's a psu cage right here it was originally like that it's just four phillips head screws oops sorry i wasn't very flush with the case there four phillips head screws and then it simply slides out like so very high quality this is also made of steel like the rest of the frame so i think we're sorry we're pretty much ready to pop this guy in we're gonna start with our aio this is the first step first step in the in the a4 h20 is to install the aio assuming that you are using an ao so we're gonna route it through like this and just for the record i've got our fans mounted as exhausts so they're gonna be at the bottom of the radiator and mounted in such a way where we're exhausting air out the top of the chassis and then i'm gonna pass our fan cables through these are technically rgb fans but there's really no point in having any lighting in this case so we're not going to connect those later and there we go we just have to mount this down and we'll just put this here for now and we just have four phillips head screws that screw into the top here taking a look at the top of the case here you can see that i do have the radiator mounted to the removable bracket that comes included with the case so again up to 240 millimeter radiators here uh the bracket is also very high quality it's a little it's a little thin so you you don't want to put too much stress on it one way or another you could bend it fairly easily but for the purpose of just mounting it and holding a radiator uh it works works great once the radiator assembly and bracket are seated flush at the top of the case you can proceed to mounting it down with four phillips head screws one two three four by the way the cpu that i'm using for this build because we are going to do we are going to check thermals at the end of this is the ryzen 9 5900x 12 core 24 thread cpu this is a cpu that i would never in a million years install use in the original dan case with a 90 millimeter liquid aio it would it would simply be a horrible idea all right it's motherboard time for what it's worth i'm using these uh pc cooler fans these moonlight they're called moonlight i did a review on these fans way back in the day very impressed by them they actually went toe to toe with noctuas in my testing which is insane but for a fraction of the price they make really good radiator fans they're on the celsius s24 from fractal design but i don't know where the fans the stock fans for that went so we're gonna use these instead i o shield is in and we're ready for motherboard mounting there's very few screws that come included with this chassis there's the motherboard screws there's four screws for an ssd at the bottom of the case and four for a power supply oh there's also two more screws that i will mention later in the video because they're kind of they're interesting their purpose is quite interesting but since this is a sample for reviewers and not a retail model they forgot to include them but they will be included with the retail model okay motherboard is installed now let's go ahead and mount the aio i have any more thermal paste in here looks like it plunger is not going any further there's still a little bit of paste in there the plunger doesn't go all the way okay i've got this one got another tube backup tube look the the plunger broke but i can still can still work with it and this guy is facing the right way yes so notice that the the aio tubes are also needing to face towards the front of the case there's no possible way that you could actually mount mount it the other way around because the motherboard would be blocking it just the motherboard tray in general would completely interfere with your tubing so front facing it is in case you're curious not that it matters too much but we have a 32 gigabyte kit crucial ballistics ddr4 at 3200 speed i believe uh if this is a personal build i'd prefer 3600 at least for a 5900 x but 32 gigs is very nice especially on the mini itx board all right aio installation complete yes yes and uh these tubes are sticking out quite a bit that's like a good two or three inches from the side panel or from the side of the case which would ordinarily terrify me in the original dan case because that case didn't have thumb screws on the side panels so unless your aio tubes were completely flush somehow with the side of the case they would just naturally pop off the side panel and it was extremely annoying pulled a lot of my hair out for that one but we won't have that problem we can just literally push this down kind of force the side panel on there as long as we're not getting any kinkage in our hoses and then just go ahead and use the thumb screws or i guess back here use the two thumb screws to secure the the side panel in place that's really nice i forgot to mention that earlier okay this is looking good uh the next step would be to well i guess we were since we're here let's install the riser table i should have taken off the stupid cover the dust cover first before i mounted the motherboard didn't think about that very tight it's okay you guys can learn learn from my mistakes as usual i feel like i teach you guys more about what not to do with tech i'm leading by anti-example okay so got that situated this is a gen 4 riser cable by the way i'm glad they sent me a gen 4 cable so i can use the more current of a gpu all right that fits in nicely now what power supply we've got a nice 700 watt sfx gold unit here this is actually pulled from a height revolt 3 chassis which had a pre-installed power supply in it and i didn't have any other high wattage sfx units on hand so i had to pull it from that case fortunately it was available though and we're just going to mount it straight to the bracket that we unmounted from the case earlier 700 watts is a little light for the system that we're building today i would prefer at least 750 considering the gpu i'm going to use but again this is mostly just for demonstration purposes and to get a feel for building in the a4 h2o okay uh it is it is a fully modular power supply as well already got the cables connected good stuff all right let's mount this puppy okay so before we mount this guy it's it's worth noting that it looks like the hoses for our aio are supposed to pass right over the psu right over here um so we're going to go ahead and have to move them kind of move them out of the way train them a bit although the hoses on this this aio are a bit thick so they're slightly more stubborn to work with and actually i should probably put the power supply cables inside of the case first what am i doing um all right like that yeah that makes it easier and sure that that clears they pass right through oh yeah that actually that actually works out um although where where is the area like i guess i'll have to pass the 24 pin cable and the other cables through this little opening as well which is pretty pretty tight so let me back this out first what i'm gonna do first is pre-route the 24-pin cable and while we're here to eight pin as well so i'm going to route these along the same half as our tubes that'll make things easier later on all right i think we're good i think we're okay to mount the power supply down now although the holes aren't lining up now because the 24 pin cable is pushing up against the the psu pretty aggressively okay there's actually an opening right here between the the motherboard the bottom corner of the motherboard and the psu where i could route the eight pin power connector through there assuming that it's long enough the cable is long enough to reach the connector on the opposite corner of the board it's possible but uh we'll have to wait and see i can definitely wrap my front panel connectors through there so okay i just tried to route the eight pin cable for our cpu through this little opening here there's just no way it's gonna happen with a 24 pin atx cable and these hoses that are just a bit too thick for this case i i've realized now there's just no possible way that that connector will fit i could maybe get like a front panel connector through there like a power switch or something like that but nothing much bigger will actually fit fortunately like i said earlier there is this opening right here at the bottom of the case that works quite well and there's a lot more free room down here because nothing has been routed through it yet so it's not gonna look the prettiest going all the way across our motherboard here with our eight pin cable but no one's really gonna see it so i don't care plugging in the 8-pin eps cable in small form factor builds is such a pain in the butt because it's always so cramped and the connector on the the motherboard is always in the very corner which is surrounded by a bunch of crap i can't see i'm shooting in the dark here they're both in there hell yeah okay cool and honestly this doesn't look too bad doesn't look as bad as i thought because the cable is fortunately long enough for us to route it kind of almost completely out of sight that's kind of nice able beautiful fall okay now we've got some other front panel business to deal with like our usb 3 which is a kind of a big boy 20 pin 20 pin connector i believe in you there we go okay all right uh you know what well before i plug that in why don't we just drop the rest of these guys i'm not gonna do hd audio because screw front panel audio and suck it i do want to take advantage of our usbc at the front so fortunately he's a smaller guy and our board does have a usb 3.1 type-c header on it nice i actually didn't check that before i started building with this board but i'm glad it has it and then finally our power switch which you could just route right here actually alongside the power supply remember when the usb 3.1 header came out on motherboards a few years back i thought they were reversible just like the usbc port is i quickly found out that they are not it looks reversible at first glance but it is deceiving they are lying to you front panel connectors are installed though so okay we only have a couple more cable like our fans we have our two radiator fans to plug into the board i'm going to ignore the rgb on these fans at that point we're almost done okay so this is the back side we've got the power supply right here you can see our 24 pin atx cable we've got our pcie cable that hasn't been used yet for our graphics card because it's not yet installed and a bit of front panel connector action going down here i routed some of the cables kind of in between the power supply and the front of the case frame so you can kind of see some of the usbc cable here usb 3 cable there um but uh where i got kind of hung up earlier a second ago was with plugging in this usb or i'm sorry the power supply pass-through cable this is the power supply pass-through cable goes from the back here where you'd actually plug it into the wall and then it plugs right into the power supply right up there you know it's kind of dark and tight hard to see and stuff especially with this hose in the way but um that was kind of a pain i struggled a bit to get this plugged into the power supply mainly because my fingers are fat there's very little space in this area to begin with to sort of work your fingers in there and also again the hoses on this aio i've learned are just way too big for this case so that's a big disclaimer if you're gonna build in this case and you're gonna use a liquid cooler get the thinnest hoses possible and maybe even the shortest hoses possible um it'll just make life a lot simpler than it is for me right now but i finally got this guy plugged in and i actually had to pull the one of the these hoses the the aio tube far out i had to pull it on this side of the case because it was too cramped otherwise it was hitting the fan blade the fan would not spin is it even spinning now oh it's getting stuck on something it's getting stuck on the hose them hose i'm just a little worried because once the graphics card's in here is it going to push this hose up a little bit and interfere with the fan a fan grill fan grills would definitely be a good idea in this case definitely a good idea not required but certainly would help but um i guess at this point we can pretty much try installing the graphics card we've got our pcie riser cable here gen4 and our power cables right here we'll leave off to the side these are just uh i just put these up here for now these are the rgbk rgb fan cables that we won't be using so i'll tuck those away later but let's go ahead and bust out our gpu now originally i was going to use this rtx 3080ti founders edition because this case actually supports rtx 30 series gpus well actually a lot of small form factor cases do but they're not really optimized for them and what i mean by that is based on the founders edition design of some of the rtx 3000 series cards um you have this fan that goes on both sides you have a fan on either side of the card so with a small form factor case like this often times that fan will be resting up against the motherboard tray or some tray that's in the middle of the case which is obviously terrible for airflow but this case actually comes included with a solution for that which is uh standoffs the case includes two 20 millimeter standoffs they're 20 millimeters high and you actually swap them out for the standoffs that are currently installed at the riser cable right here and that actually brings it further out 20 millimeters actually it'll be a little bit more than 20 millimeters away from this plate that way your effie fan won't be completely choked off and will actually get some airflow unfortunately those two standoffs are the two screws that did not come included with this review sample kit from liam lee and dan case so i won't be using the fe after all instead rather dare i try to mount this asus rog strix rtx 2080 instead i think i think i'm gonna try i think i'm gonna try that but first i actually need to remove the expansion slots and if you haven't noticed yet this case actually mounts the gpu upside down not only is it a riser cable on the opposite side of the motherboard but it's actually mounted inverse so you know that's kind of fun doesn't really make much of a difference to me all right before i mount the graphics card though i'm gonna do something here i'm going to try zip tying this guy although one zip tie is not long enough i'm gonna zip tie this this hose this aio tube to one of the power supply connectors that's coming from the power supply obviously in order to hoist it up away from the radiator fan does not interfere with its blades will this work i have no idea probably not but i'm willing to try oh let's say it could work let's try to mount this gpu oh i definitely need i definitely need that 20 those 20 millimeter standoffs for this riser cable they wouldn't just come in handy for the founders edition gpus they would also come in handy so for cable management because right now i cannot push this graphics card against flat enough against the motherboard tray in order to get it slotted into the the riser cable because there's too many too many cables the cables be too thick bruh all this all this it's not working out um you know what i'm gonna do all right so basically this is here's the deal i can't really progress i cannot install the gpu right now because a this hose is too thick and these cables are too thick and it's just not mounting flush enough and this riser cable is too close to the freaking motherboard tray so what i need to do is either swap out the ao for one with thinner tubes or get some 20 millimeter tall standoffs that were supposed to come included with this case and swap them out so i can bring the riser cable further away from the motherboard tray i think i'm gonna do the latter because screw undoing all the hard work that i've already done is kind of a pain so i'm just going to go ahead and buy them online right now hopefully with prime shipping if i buy them on amazon they'll be here by tomorrow uh or two days from now at the latest and then we'll continue to build on from there and at that point fingers crossed that we don't run into any more issues all right we're back and what do you know i've got the standoffs that i need now these 20 millimeter long ones i actually just bought this kit off of amazon for a few bucks it's probably like 9 or 10 bucks it comes with a variety of different standoffs and screws but we're only really interested in the 20 millimeter tall ones because this is the one these are the ones that are gonna get our graphics card to fit uh properly with the expansion slots at the back of the case so first rule of order here is to unmount the riser cable there are two screws holding it in place one and two well that was easy but before we get these new standoffs in here we have to remove the old ones which are right there of course and these are probably these look like they might be like six six to eight millimeters tall definitely not what we need for our founders edition card so and then we simply swap out those for the new standoffs and these standoffs that i bought are made of nylon which i would have preferred metal but they didn't have any metal ones with prime shipping i would have had to wait a few more days for those to come in it was like ah it's not worth it but nylon will still get the job done i've actually threaded in pretty easily i was a little skeptical at first but they do the trick just fine but there you go 20 milliliter standoffs installed and then we just got to mount this guy back onto here lining up looks like it's lining up just fine sorry if i'm like blocking your guys's view you can't really see very well you'll just have to use your imaginations okay we are ready for graphics card move that guy and we'll deal with this cable later okay i think that's pretty good yeah the the other thing is that as i was trying to push the uh the graphics card into the riser cable the riser cable wasn't staying put it was actually kind of sloping down a little bit because again the standoffs are nylon they're made of nylon not metal it's another reason why i would definitely highly suggest metal standoffs if you are going to be mounting a gpu this way those 20 millimeter ones should be metal just to keep the riser cable in place when you're pushing down on it with the graphics card but i was able to just sort of push the riser cable up into the graphics card once it was mounted where it needed to be and that seems to do the trick so okay the graphics card is installed uh-oh there's a problem hear that that's the sound of the fan blades on this fan hitting one of the cables that's back here how is this possible okay never mind never mind we're good the fan i got the fan working the fan's spinning it's free it's not cut on anything i was just able to stick my finger back here and kind of press down on some of the cables and the hosing and i got it to stick to the point where it's no longer interfering with the fan so i'm kind of spinning the fan with my finger with my pinky right now i can see it turning hold on but i'm pretty sure the fan's free yep i just saw it rotate okay so we're good and the fans at the bottom here the radiator fans for aio those are also free as well i got the uh the hoses zip tied to the bottom of the case here actually just routed the zip tie through a couple of the ventilation openings at the bottom plate where you mount the ssd and that's just barely enough to get those hoses to clear this radiator fan right here i'm looking at it right now there's probably maybe two to three millimeters of clearance between the lowest point of the hose and the fan so we just we just barely scrape by there power supply cable there's really no good place to put this without interfering with this fan right here so i'm just going to leave it kind of loose should be fine once i put the side panel on oh actually we have to connect the gpu i mean we have to plug it in duh we need power so unfortunately this 12-pin adapter does make it a little bit more cumbersome up here just adding a bit more cable length to an already very cramped space but i'm pretty confident we can get by okay yeah that actually stashes away just fine okay it's just it's going fine it's totally fine nothing will go wrong let's melt this back she goes this way right nice nice nice nice oh this will be the ultimate test to see if the other side panel goes on because of this freaking hose that's sticking out can you see how much that hose is protruding from the side of the kit look at this ah they need to start making some manufactured ao manufacturers you can start making some small form factor areas with shorter tubing shorter tubes would be nice for some of these tiny belts just saying i think we can work with this though hopefully the tube is quite flexible ooh if i can actually tuck it right ooh look at that oh oh nope that's also blocking that's blocking the fan okay that fan still going good all right if we just try to force it if we just force the side panel on and screw her down that might be enough might be enough let's see let's see oh okay okay and we're not pinching the hose down at this flatness to make the hose this flat for the side panel to get on it's not pinching or it's not uh what's called kinking kinking the tubing whatsoever so we're good there and it looks like even without the thumb screws to secure the side panel on it's fine we technically don't need to screw those in if we don't want to because it's not popping off by itself but it's just gonna install a bit more confidence if we do so i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it for both side panels here there we go all the side panels are on everything's sitting flush and this build is complete let's go ahead and turn it on to make sure none of the fans are getting hung up on any cables or tubing and if that all looks good we'll go ahead and run some tests okie dokie artichokey here we go oh oh it turned on okay that was weird it was so quiet when it first turned on which which is a good sign that means none of our fans are being caught thank god thank the lord second question will we post please please please god i know it just needs a second just needs a minute to warm up that's all everything all right let me try flashing the bios and see if that works please please please please thank god this motherboard has a bios flashback button on the back by the way that makes it a lot easier didn't have to uninstall our ao water block and drop a 3000 series ryzen processor in there just to get a video signal then update the bios that way through the bios ah but did it matter anyway did it even matter so if the video signal is still not showing and the bios is up to date could be a couple things first culprit is the pca riser cable i've learned i learned from the nr200p build that i did recently riser cable i already knew that riser cables were finicky but that is now anytime there's a riser cable involved if there's no video signal apart from the bios update that's the first thing i look at is the riser cable and it's kind of interesting because this is a gen 4 cable i confirmed it's definitely a gen 4 cable we're using a gen 4 card but that's still not a guarantee with a riser cable because ryzer cables they suck gen 4 riser cables are a piece of crap the whole gen 4 thing is a mess when it comes to riser cables so i i'm thinking maybe oh another thing that'll prevent your riser cable from working is if it's not plugged in you can see at some point along the build process the riser cable was accidentally popped out of the motherboard slot so yeah i i think that i think that might be it ha ha look at that did the trick worked like a charm who knew things need to be plugged in in order for computers to work okay i'm gonna go ahead and install windows and then we'll get tested we're gonna do some thermal testing thank god this didn't turn into a nightmare troubleshooting video like the nr200p build uh once that's installed i got drivers in there i will give you guys a final look at the system's performance its behavior and what kind of thermals we're getting out of this little guy all right we're here in red dead redemption 2 running at 1440p 2560x1440 to be exact and we've been going for about 25 minutes now arthur is galloping on his little horsey and you might notice some black screen flickering here and there that literally just started happening it was totally fine the entire time and i just noticed it started flickering i'm not exactly sure what's going on there drivers are up to date i would assume again that maybe the the riser cable is to blame maybe it's pinched maybe it's bad or going bad i can't be sure but that's kind of irrelevant to what we're talking about here the system is apart from the flickering now uh operating smoothly uh and you can see that our graphics card is hitting around 72c on the core which is actually not too shabby when you consider this is an rtx 3080 ti that's inside of a small form factor case only 11 liters large it's at 95 utilization so practically full load there getting around between 1850 or 1840 and 1900 megahertz of their bouts uh pulling about 345 watts from the wall that's just the gpu not the total system load but so far the system hasn't powered down as a fail-safe to protect the power supply so it looks like the 700 watt unit is working okay for now again i would probably recommend 750 if you were running a configuration with these specs uh but that being said we're eating about six gigs of vram and our cpu is hovering at around 73 degrees celsius the hottest i've seen it get so far is about 80 c on the gpu it hasn't really passed 7475c uh but the cpu did hit adc i think we were in a cinematic at some point and it did get a little toasty um it's actually kind of surprising how warm the cpu is getting considering that it's at a much lower load than the gpu you can see we're only hovering at around 30 to 40 percent uh sometimes lower than that um i think this is just attributed to the fact that we have a ryzen 9 3900x in here and the fans are set to exhaust which means that they're actually sucking up all the heat coming off of the graphics card maybe not all of it but definitely a good chunk of it before it's actually passing through the fin stack in the radiator so that could be heating things up i'd be very curious to see how temps would be if we flip those fans around to intake pulling fresh air from the bottom there's not a whole lot of room at the bottom of the case for airflow though so i can't imagine that it would be much better there's probably only about a centimeter or so of clearance between uh the desk that the the system's on and the actual bottom of the case so i can't imagine that would do much maybe if we elevated the the case off of the feet a little bit more to provide some more airflow but hard to say for now overall though these are totally acceptable temperatures especially on the gpu i'm very surprised at how low it is considering this is a founder's edition card i was a little bit nervous at first that our rear-facing fan on the gpu would still be choked for airflow even though we are using those 20 millimeter standoffs but it seems okay and this is of course without oh we just hit 83c on the cpu it's gel toasty there get a little toasty but bear in mind this is without any fan tuning on the aio fans on the radiator fans and in the case like this a small form factor case it's very common uh to undervolt your cpu so that you can get those lower temperatures uh sometimes you get some insane results like you can drop the cpu temps by 10 degrees or more without really incurring that much performance loss when it comes to frame rate especially in the game like this where it's more heavily gpu bound than anything if this was my personal build i'd definitely try flipping the uh the radiator fans oh and i'm about to get shot damn i'm making a bit you sons a bit uh anyway i would try flipping the radiator fans um for one i would definitely tune the fans uh to get a nice sweet spot between acoustics and uh and thermals and finally i would certainly undervolt the cpu because it's just getting a little too toasty for my liking as is on the gpu side of things i don't think i would change a thing um for a 3080 ti i don't really see any much point in overclocking it especially because we're not it's really not getting any uh sort of intake for it whatsoever i mean the intake is just straight from the side of the side of the case it's getting it directly through the ventilation on the side panel but there's no actual fans in this case that's blowing fresh air towards the graphics card so i would probably just leave that alone i don't think there's any need to undervolt the gpu though unlike the cpu just because the temperatures are just fine they're looking really good but yeah at the end of the day i really think this a4 h2o case is a huge step over the original dan case a4 uh simply because you just with that original case you would not be able to squeeze this level of power inside of such a small chassis uh there's no way you could get uh certainly not an rtx 3080 or any 3000 series founders edition card in there because that again that rear fan would just be completely choked off so i really appreciate the flexibility that this case offers over the original and there's absolutely no way in hell i could ever cram a ryzen 9 5 900 x 12 core processor inside of the original dan case without shooting brakes i mean there's just absolutely no way that's sustainable on a 90 millimeter radiator just impossible but in this case while the temperatures on the cpu do tend to get a little bit too high for my liking there's certainly room to to tweak that and you can certainly bring those temperatures down by doing a number of those things that i suggested like overvolting or i'm sorry undervolting for example the end result is a very tiny but very fast pc uh as you can see at 1440p at red dead redemption we're pretty much on ultra settings with dlss on balanced mode we're still getting over 100 fps on average which is pretty fantastic for a demanding game like this as for acoustics the system is staying much quieter than i expected it to it's still under full load running the same game um and i'll lean in so you can hear it on my mic mike's right here i'll back away this is ambient noise in the room and this is how it sounds from a more i guess realistic distance if i were playing a game right now it's a very scientific test going into this review i had a feeling that this case was going to be a huge upgrade over the original dan case a4 and i still stand by that opinion i i think it's a huge upgrade mainly because of the additional hardware support and honestly the the extra space that it takes up over the original case i think it's well worth it uh considering how much more hardware you can cram into here and how much better cooling you can get as well uh particularly with your cpu so oh also just i gotta shout out again the price drop thank you liam lee and then case for dropping the price on this case and making it more competitive i think it makes it a very compelling option for people who are looking to cram a lot of power into a very little space but you guys let me know what you think if you like this video toss a like on it before you go get subscribe for more tech content on the way and i will see you guys in the next videoyou see that big beautiful wall mounted pc right there it's a sexy beast right yeah yeah i know it looks good i built it with my own two hands is it fat of course it's fast it's blazing fast but today i have managed to cram about the same amount of power of that behemoth into this little guy right here the new case that we'll be checking out today proof that size doesn't matter or at least that's what i tell myself this portion of this video was sponsored by klarna kyra can you take out the trash yeah i'll i'll do it later do it now just pause the game i can't pause the game i said now sometimes later is better than now klarna is a free app in chrome extension that lets you buy now and pay later with clorna you can pay in the way that works best for you paying 4 lets you split the cost of a purchase into four interest-free payments pay in 30 days is a great option if you don't want to pay a cent until you've tried the product and decide to keep it or you can take advantage of their monthly financing option with over 250 000 partnered merchants you can use clarinet to shop at your favorite stores and automatically apply coupons and cashback rates at checkout so you never overpay again klarna's intuitive mobile app also lets you log in track your purchases pay in for anywhere and shop for deals to start saving and paying on your terms just click the link in the description to add clorna from any device kicks due to inactivity great great thanks mom you can unpause your game now that's not never mind thanks to kalona for sponsoring that part of my video now back to my regular content all righty here we go so this this case this is this is not a new case this is an old case this is the original dan case a4 and i used to really like this case this was my favorite one of my favorite small form factor cases in its day and when it first came out because for one it's just so tiny it's so so small and cute look at my whole hand the whole hand could fit on there it's a little baby i really like this case a lot because of how small it was it was very portable very compact i brought it everywhere ces my friend's place it was great the other thing i really liked about it is considering its size it actually fits some pretty decently sized hardware you could fit up to uh i think a 300 and something millimeter long gpu definitely full length gpu clearance here but there were some compromises to this case as well for example even though you could fit a lengthy gpu it was limited to two slots two slot design which i feel like you're gonna build something that's relatively high end two slots is is not really cutting it as much because we have a lot more cards that are more powerful that have beefier coolers on them so even if you have a two slot card and it's a fairly high end fairly powerful it probably has a beefy cooler on it that's wider than two slots maybe 2.5 or even three slots and so this case is very limited in that sense now with modern day gpus the other limitation that it had and i think this is the biggest one was cooling you could only fit up to a 90 millimeter radiator in here which is like what 90 millimeter aos do those even exist yes they do but they're not very common and there's not a lot of options for them and they're not very effective honestly you could really you really had to think about what cpu you were putting in here you couldn't push it too far because the cooling potential in this chassis was just so limited so fast forward to present day and dan cases and liam lee have teamed up once again to make this this is the a4 h2o essentially the successor to uh what i would call a legendary small form factor case in the pc world i'm very excited about this chassis i've been waiting for this case for a long time when they hit me up and said hey it's ready you want to check it out i hopped on the opportunity immediately what they've essentially done here is enlarge the case slightly in exchange for more hardware support so now we can fit up to a 240 millimeter radiator as well as triple slot gpus look at that pretty fancy now there's a few more cool things about this case that we'll get into later but i think personally based on those two improvements alone it's absolutely worth the size increase because even when you when you look at them side by side the original and the h2o they're not they're not that much different it's not that much bigger so it sounds slightly bigger on paper this is 7.25 liters going to 11.1 liters but when you look at them when you look at it it's not it's not that much bigger it's an inch wider that's probably the the most detrimental uh increase in size the height is maybe just shy of two inches taller which i don't think is going to bother most people just because height doesn't take up any more space on your desk and then it's pretty much exactly the same depth-wise it looks like the original is slightly less long at first but you can see that the the side panels actually protrude out past the top panel making them virtually the same depth so right off the bat i'm going to say that this was absolutely a fair trade and i would gladly take a slightly larger case for the added features that they've included here but of course we still have to do a build in this case just to make sure that nothing's weird and everything's working properly which is why i have all these parts flying around that that i'll be building with today but just random parts that i pulled off the shelf i wouldn't necessarily uh pair these all together if i was doing a personal build or whatever they're just kind of there to give us an idea of what it's like to build in this new chassis before i actually start building though i did want to give you guys a quick look at the outside of the case before we start diving in so for starters we have aluminum on the outside all these panels are aluminum and then we have a steel frame on the inside everything is very rigid feels very secure doesn't wobble or anything like that you've got a solid front panel right here no ventilation but you do have ventilation on the other three panels sides and top and they're all toollessly removable with the help of liam lee's push pin technology as was seen on the original design case they're very easy to pop off assuming that you're not filming with your other hand uh just pops off like that with the side panels though you do have two thumb screws on either side that you just remove first that's just for added security and then you also have front i o or left side i o i should say so you've got a power button up top feels feels nice and clicky we have usb type c and then we have audio jacks for mic and headphone as well as usb 3 type a on the back side you guys already had a peak of that but we'll take a look again you have a cutout for your motherboard and then three slots for your gpu so just like the original dam case this does use a riser cable so you can actually see it right there uh oh i'll talk more about the riser cable in just a second but uh you also have this motherboard tray that kind of intersects the case right in the middle so it sort of divides it up into two compartments just like the og case where you've got your motherboard and power supply on one side and your discrete gpu on the other up here we've got a pass through port for the power supply so obviously the power supply doesn't get mounted here it's actually sort of at the front on the left side of the chassis supports sfx and sfxl units i would suggest sfx non-l if you want additional room in there for managing cables and that sort of thing on the bottom of the case we have two rubber feet one two that span the entire width of the chassis which i really like i really like this look i know most people just won't give a second glance or like whatever kyle the rubber feet get over it but i think it just looks really clean and modern i hope this becomes a trend in my opinion it just looks a little cleaner than four individual feet and it also just i don't know it's probably just a placebo effect but it just makes the case feel a bit more planted on the desk and then finally we have this bottom portion here this is actually a removable panel um it's got a bunch of ventilation here and then we have four rubber anti-vibration pads where you can mount a two and a half inch uh ssd or hard drive obviously that would go on the inside of the case and that's pretty much the outside of the a4 h2o i think we're pretty much ready to build uh oh i guess i should mention pricing because i kind of have an idea of what this is going to cost they don't they didn't give me an exact number but they gave me a pretty close approximation so if you want the model with the gen 3 riser cable it's going to be anywhere between 120 to 130 us dollars and if you opt for the gen 4 cable assuming that you're going to go with a more modern day gpu then that's going to run you roughly 155 to 165 us which i think is fantastic it's a lot more competitive than what this case was originally priced at again i paid well over 200 for it back in the day they've dropped that down significantly i think they realize that the sff community the sff market has gotten a lot more competitive a lot more options out there than there were when this uh case first launched and so i think they're just taking note of that and and uh responding accordingly so you guys let me know what you think of the price though and the value of this case once this video is done on that note let's go ahead and start the build yes okie dokie we have the dan case mostly disassembled here with all four of the side panels removed we also have our motherboard assembled for the most part the only thing i left out is the water block of our aio i left that uninstalled because we're actually going to need to pass that through the top of the case and pass it through to the bottom in order to mount our radiator to the top and uh i should mention that radiator support is limited to 30 millimeters thick that just includes the radiator so you can do a 30 up to a 30 millimeter thick radiator and then 25 millimeter thick fans and that's pretty much the clearance that you have at the top so uh the other thing that i removed apart from the side panels was the psu cage so there's a psu cage right here it was originally like that it's just four phillips head screws oops sorry i wasn't very flush with the case there four phillips head screws and then it simply slides out like so very high quality this is also made of steel like the rest of the frame so i think we're sorry we're pretty much ready to pop this guy in we're gonna start with our aio this is the first step first step in the in the a4 h20 is to install the aio assuming that you are using an ao so we're gonna route it through like this and just for the record i've got our fans mounted as exhausts so they're gonna be at the bottom of the radiator and mounted in such a way where we're exhausting air out the top of the chassis and then i'm gonna pass our fan cables through these are technically rgb fans but there's really no point in having any lighting in this case so we're not going to connect those later and there we go we just have to mount this down and we'll just put this here for now and we just have four phillips head screws that screw into the top here taking a look at the top of the case here you can see that i do have the radiator mounted to the removable bracket that comes included with the case so again up to 240 millimeter radiators here uh the bracket is also very high quality it's a little it's a little thin so you you don't want to put too much stress on it one way or another you could bend it fairly easily but for the purpose of just mounting it and holding a radiator uh it works works great once the radiator assembly and bracket are seated flush at the top of the case you can proceed to mounting it down with four phillips head screws one two three four by the way the cpu that i'm using for this build because we are going to do we are going to check thermals at the end of this is the ryzen 9 5900x 12 core 24 thread cpu this is a cpu that i would never in a million years install use in the original dan case with a 90 millimeter liquid aio it would it would simply be a horrible idea all right it's motherboard time for what it's worth i'm using these uh pc cooler fans these moonlight they're called moonlight i did a review on these fans way back in the day very impressed by them they actually went toe to toe with noctuas in my testing which is insane but for a fraction of the price they make really good radiator fans they're on the celsius s24 from fractal design but i don't know where the fans the stock fans for that went so we're gonna use these instead i o shield is in and we're ready for motherboard mounting there's very few screws that come included with this chassis there's the motherboard screws there's four screws for an ssd at the bottom of the case and four for a power supply oh there's also two more screws that i will mention later in the video because they're kind of they're interesting their purpose is quite interesting but since this is a sample for reviewers and not a retail model they forgot to include them but they will be included with the retail model okay motherboard is installed now let's go ahead and mount the aio i have any more thermal paste in here looks like it plunger is not going any further there's still a little bit of paste in there the plunger doesn't go all the way okay i've got this one got another tube backup tube look the the plunger broke but i can still can still work with it and this guy is facing the right way yes so notice that the the aio tubes are also needing to face towards the front of the case there's no possible way that you could actually mount mount it the other way around because the motherboard would be blocking it just the motherboard tray in general would completely interfere with your tubing so front facing it is in case you're curious not that it matters too much but we have a 32 gigabyte kit crucial ballistics ddr4 at 3200 speed i believe uh if this is a personal build i'd prefer 3600 at least for a 5900 x but 32 gigs is very nice especially on the mini itx board all right aio installation complete yes yes and uh these tubes are sticking out quite a bit that's like a good two or three inches from the side panel or from the side of the case which would ordinarily terrify me in the original dan case because that case didn't have thumb screws on the side panels so unless your aio tubes were completely flush somehow with the side of the case they would just naturally pop off the side panel and it was extremely annoying pulled a lot of my hair out for that one but we won't have that problem we can just literally push this down kind of force the side panel on there as long as we're not getting any kinkage in our hoses and then just go ahead and use the thumb screws or i guess back here use the two thumb screws to secure the the side panel in place that's really nice i forgot to mention that earlier okay this is looking good uh the next step would be to well i guess we were since we're here let's install the riser table i should have taken off the stupid cover the dust cover first before i mounted the motherboard didn't think about that very tight it's okay you guys can learn learn from my mistakes as usual i feel like i teach you guys more about what not to do with tech i'm leading by anti-example okay so got that situated this is a gen 4 riser cable by the way i'm glad they sent me a gen 4 cable so i can use the more current of a gpu all right that fits in nicely now what power supply we've got a nice 700 watt sfx gold unit here this is actually pulled from a height revolt 3 chassis which had a pre-installed power supply in it and i didn't have any other high wattage sfx units on hand so i had to pull it from that case fortunately it was available though and we're just going to mount it straight to the bracket that we unmounted from the case earlier 700 watts is a little light for the system that we're building today i would prefer at least 750 considering the gpu i'm going to use but again this is mostly just for demonstration purposes and to get a feel for building in the a4 h2o okay uh it is it is a fully modular power supply as well already got the cables connected good stuff all right let's mount this puppy okay so before we mount this guy it's it's worth noting that it looks like the hoses for our aio are supposed to pass right over the psu right over here um so we're going to go ahead and have to move them kind of move them out of the way train them a bit although the hoses on this this aio are a bit thick so they're slightly more stubborn to work with and actually i should probably put the power supply cables inside of the case first what am i doing um all right like that yeah that makes it easier and sure that that clears they pass right through oh yeah that actually that actually works out um although where where is the area like i guess i'll have to pass the 24 pin cable and the other cables through this little opening as well which is pretty pretty tight so let me back this out first what i'm gonna do first is pre-route the 24-pin cable and while we're here to eight pin as well so i'm going to route these along the same half as our tubes that'll make things easier later on all right i think we're good i think we're okay to mount the power supply down now although the holes aren't lining up now because the 24 pin cable is pushing up against the the psu pretty aggressively okay there's actually an opening right here between the the motherboard the bottom corner of the motherboard and the psu where i could route the eight pin power connector through there assuming that it's long enough the cable is long enough to reach the connector on the opposite corner of the board it's possible but uh we'll have to wait and see i can definitely wrap my front panel connectors through there so okay i just tried to route the eight pin cable for our cpu through this little opening here there's just no way it's gonna happen with a 24 pin atx cable and these hoses that are just a bit too thick for this case i i've realized now there's just no possible way that that connector will fit i could maybe get like a front panel connector through there like a power switch or something like that but nothing much bigger will actually fit fortunately like i said earlier there is this opening right here at the bottom of the case that works quite well and there's a lot more free room down here because nothing has been routed through it yet so it's not gonna look the prettiest going all the way across our motherboard here with our eight pin cable but no one's really gonna see it so i don't care plugging in the 8-pin eps cable in small form factor builds is such a pain in the butt because it's always so cramped and the connector on the the motherboard is always in the very corner which is surrounded by a bunch of crap i can't see i'm shooting in the dark here they're both in there hell yeah okay cool and honestly this doesn't look too bad doesn't look as bad as i thought because the cable is fortunately long enough for us to route it kind of almost completely out of sight that's kind of nice able beautiful fall okay now we've got some other front panel business to deal with like our usb 3 which is a kind of a big boy 20 pin 20 pin connector i believe in you there we go okay all right uh you know what well before i plug that in why don't we just drop the rest of these guys i'm not gonna do hd audio because screw front panel audio and suck it i do want to take advantage of our usbc at the front so fortunately he's a smaller guy and our board does have a usb 3.1 type-c header on it nice i actually didn't check that before i started building with this board but i'm glad it has it and then finally our power switch which you could just route right here actually alongside the power supply remember when the usb 3.1 header came out on motherboards a few years back i thought they were reversible just like the usbc port is i quickly found out that they are not it looks reversible at first glance but it is deceiving they are lying to you front panel connectors are installed though so okay we only have a couple more cable like our fans we have our two radiator fans to plug into the board i'm going to ignore the rgb on these fans at that point we're almost done okay so this is the back side we've got the power supply right here you can see our 24 pin atx cable we've got our pcie cable that hasn't been used yet for our graphics card because it's not yet installed and a bit of front panel connector action going down here i routed some of the cables kind of in between the power supply and the front of the case frame so you can kind of see some of the usbc cable here usb 3 cable there um but uh where i got kind of hung up earlier a second ago was with plugging in this usb or i'm sorry the power supply pass-through cable this is the power supply pass-through cable goes from the back here where you'd actually plug it into the wall and then it plugs right into the power supply right up there you know it's kind of dark and tight hard to see and stuff especially with this hose in the way but um that was kind of a pain i struggled a bit to get this plugged into the power supply mainly because my fingers are fat there's very little space in this area to begin with to sort of work your fingers in there and also again the hoses on this aio i've learned are just way too big for this case so that's a big disclaimer if you're gonna build in this case and you're gonna use a liquid cooler get the thinnest hoses possible and maybe even the shortest hoses possible um it'll just make life a lot simpler than it is for me right now but i finally got this guy plugged in and i actually had to pull the one of the these hoses the the aio tube far out i had to pull it on this side of the case because it was too cramped otherwise it was hitting the fan blade the fan would not spin is it even spinning now oh it's getting stuck on something it's getting stuck on the hose them hose i'm just a little worried because once the graphics card's in here is it going to push this hose up a little bit and interfere with the fan a fan grill fan grills would definitely be a good idea in this case definitely a good idea not required but certainly would help but um i guess at this point we can pretty much try installing the graphics card we've got our pcie riser cable here gen4 and our power cables right here we'll leave off to the side these are just uh i just put these up here for now these are the rgbk rgb fan cables that we won't be using so i'll tuck those away later but let's go ahead and bust out our gpu now originally i was going to use this rtx 3080ti founders edition because this case actually supports rtx 30 series gpus well actually a lot of small form factor cases do but they're not really optimized for them and what i mean by that is based on the founders edition design of some of the rtx 3000 series cards um you have this fan that goes on both sides you have a fan on either side of the card so with a small form factor case like this often times that fan will be resting up against the motherboard tray or some tray that's in the middle of the case which is obviously terrible for airflow but this case actually comes included with a solution for that which is uh standoffs the case includes two 20 millimeter standoffs they're 20 millimeters high and you actually swap them out for the standoffs that are currently installed at the riser cable right here and that actually brings it further out 20 millimeters actually it'll be a little bit more than 20 millimeters away from this plate that way your effie fan won't be completely choked off and will actually get some airflow unfortunately those two standoffs are the two screws that did not come included with this review sample kit from liam lee and dan case so i won't be using the fe after all instead rather dare i try to mount this asus rog strix rtx 2080 instead i think i think i'm gonna try i think i'm gonna try that but first i actually need to remove the expansion slots and if you haven't noticed yet this case actually mounts the gpu upside down not only is it a riser cable on the opposite side of the motherboard but it's actually mounted inverse so you know that's kind of fun doesn't really make much of a difference to me all right before i mount the graphics card though i'm gonna do something here i'm going to try zip tying this guy although one zip tie is not long enough i'm gonna zip tie this this hose this aio tube to one of the power supply connectors that's coming from the power supply obviously in order to hoist it up away from the radiator fan does not interfere with its blades will this work i have no idea probably not but i'm willing to try oh let's say it could work let's try to mount this gpu oh i definitely need i definitely need that 20 those 20 millimeter standoffs for this riser cable they wouldn't just come in handy for the founders edition gpus they would also come in handy so for cable management because right now i cannot push this graphics card against flat enough against the motherboard tray in order to get it slotted into the the riser cable because there's too many too many cables the cables be too thick bruh all this all this it's not working out um you know what i'm gonna do all right so basically this is here's the deal i can't really progress i cannot install the gpu right now because a this hose is too thick and these cables are too thick and it's just not mounting flush enough and this riser cable is too close to the freaking motherboard tray so what i need to do is either swap out the ao for one with thinner tubes or get some 20 millimeter tall standoffs that were supposed to come included with this case and swap them out so i can bring the riser cable further away from the motherboard tray i think i'm gonna do the latter because screw undoing all the hard work that i've already done is kind of a pain so i'm just going to go ahead and buy them online right now hopefully with prime shipping if i buy them on amazon they'll be here by tomorrow uh or two days from now at the latest and then we'll continue to build on from there and at that point fingers crossed that we don't run into any more issues all right we're back and what do you know i've got the standoffs that i need now these 20 millimeter long ones i actually just bought this kit off of amazon for a few bucks it's probably like 9 or 10 bucks it comes with a variety of different standoffs and screws but we're only really interested in the 20 millimeter tall ones because this is the one these are the ones that are gonna get our graphics card to fit uh properly with the expansion slots at the back of the case so first rule of order here is to unmount the riser cable there are two screws holding it in place one and two well that was easy but before we get these new standoffs in here we have to remove the old ones which are right there of course and these are probably these look like they might be like six six to eight millimeters tall definitely not what we need for our founders edition card so and then we simply swap out those for the new standoffs and these standoffs that i bought are made of nylon which i would have preferred metal but they didn't have any metal ones with prime shipping i would have had to wait a few more days for those to come in it was like ah it's not worth it but nylon will still get the job done i've actually threaded in pretty easily i was a little skeptical at first but they do the trick just fine but there you go 20 milliliter standoffs installed and then we just got to mount this guy back onto here lining up looks like it's lining up just fine sorry if i'm like blocking your guys's view you can't really see very well you'll just have to use your imaginations okay we are ready for graphics card move that guy and we'll deal with this cable later okay i think that's pretty good yeah the the other thing is that as i was trying to push the uh the graphics card into the riser cable the riser cable wasn't staying put it was actually kind of sloping down a little bit because again the standoffs are nylon they're made of nylon not metal it's another reason why i would definitely highly suggest metal standoffs if you are going to be mounting a gpu this way those 20 millimeter ones should be metal just to keep the riser cable in place when you're pushing down on it with the graphics card but i was able to just sort of push the riser cable up into the graphics card once it was mounted where it needed to be and that seems to do the trick so okay the graphics card is installed uh-oh there's a problem hear that that's the sound of the fan blades on this fan hitting one of the cables that's back here how is this possible okay never mind never mind we're good the fan i got the fan working the fan's spinning it's free it's not cut on anything i was just able to stick my finger back here and kind of press down on some of the cables and the hosing and i got it to stick to the point where it's no longer interfering with the fan so i'm kind of spinning the fan with my finger with my pinky right now i can see it turning hold on but i'm pretty sure the fan's free yep i just saw it rotate okay so we're good and the fans at the bottom here the radiator fans for aio those are also free as well i got the uh the hoses zip tied to the bottom of the case here actually just routed the zip tie through a couple of the ventilation openings at the bottom plate where you mount the ssd and that's just barely enough to get those hoses to clear this radiator fan right here i'm looking at it right now there's probably maybe two to three millimeters of clearance between the lowest point of the hose and the fan so we just we just barely scrape by there power supply cable there's really no good place to put this without interfering with this fan right here so i'm just going to leave it kind of loose should be fine once i put the side panel on oh actually we have to connect the gpu i mean we have to plug it in duh we need power so unfortunately this 12-pin adapter does make it a little bit more cumbersome up here just adding a bit more cable length to an already very cramped space but i'm pretty confident we can get by okay yeah that actually stashes away just fine okay it's just it's going fine it's totally fine nothing will go wrong let's melt this back she goes this way right nice nice nice nice oh this will be the ultimate test to see if the other side panel goes on because of this freaking hose that's sticking out can you see how much that hose is protruding from the side of the kit look at this ah they need to start making some manufactured ao manufacturers you can start making some small form factor areas with shorter tubing shorter tubes would be nice for some of these tiny belts just saying i think we can work with this though hopefully the tube is quite flexible ooh if i can actually tuck it right ooh look at that oh oh nope that's also blocking that's blocking the fan okay that fan still going good all right if we just try to force it if we just force the side panel on and screw her down that might be enough might be enough let's see let's see oh okay okay and we're not pinching the hose down at this flatness to make the hose this flat for the side panel to get on it's not pinching or it's not uh what's called kinking kinking the tubing whatsoever so we're good there and it looks like even without the thumb screws to secure the side panel on it's fine we technically don't need to screw those in if we don't want to because it's not popping off by itself but it's just gonna install a bit more confidence if we do so i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it for both side panels here there we go all the side panels are on everything's sitting flush and this build is complete let's go ahead and turn it on to make sure none of the fans are getting hung up on any cables or tubing and if that all looks good we'll go ahead and run some tests okie dokie artichokey here we go oh oh it turned on okay that was weird it was so quiet when it first turned on which which is a good sign that means none of our fans are being caught thank god thank the lord second question will we post please please please god i know it just needs a second just needs a minute to warm up that's all everything all right let me try flashing the bios and see if that works please please please please thank god this motherboard has a bios flashback button on the back by the way that makes it a lot easier didn't have to uninstall our ao water block and drop a 3000 series ryzen processor in there just to get a video signal then update the bios that way through the bios ah but did it matter anyway did it even matter so if the video signal is still not showing and the bios is up to date could be a couple things first culprit is the pca riser cable i've learned i learned from the nr200p build that i did recently riser cable i already knew that riser cables were finicky but that is now anytime there's a riser cable involved if there's no video signal apart from the bios update that's the first thing i look at is the riser cable and it's kind of interesting because this is a gen 4 cable i confirmed it's definitely a gen 4 cable we're using a gen 4 card but that's still not a guarantee with a riser cable because ryzer cables they suck gen 4 riser cables are a piece of crap the whole gen 4 thing is a mess when it comes to riser cables so i i'm thinking maybe oh another thing that'll prevent your riser cable from working is if it's not plugged in you can see at some point along the build process the riser cable was accidentally popped out of the motherboard slot so yeah i i think that i think that might be it ha ha look at that did the trick worked like a charm who knew things need to be plugged in in order for computers to work okay i'm gonna go ahead and install windows and then we'll get tested we're gonna do some thermal testing thank god this didn't turn into a nightmare troubleshooting video like the nr200p build uh once that's installed i got drivers in there i will give you guys a final look at the system's performance its behavior and what kind of thermals we're getting out of this little guy all right we're here in red dead redemption 2 running at 1440p 2560x1440 to be exact and we've been going for about 25 minutes now arthur is galloping on his little horsey and you might notice some black screen flickering here and there that literally just started happening it was totally fine the entire time and i just noticed it started flickering i'm not exactly sure what's going on there drivers are up to date i would assume again that maybe the the riser cable is to blame maybe it's pinched maybe it's bad or going bad i can't be sure but that's kind of irrelevant to what we're talking about here the system is apart from the flickering now uh operating smoothly uh and you can see that our graphics card is hitting around 72c on the core which is actually not too shabby when you consider this is an rtx 3080 ti that's inside of a small form factor case only 11 liters large it's at 95 utilization so practically full load there getting around between 1850 or 1840 and 1900 megahertz of their bouts uh pulling about 345 watts from the wall that's just the gpu not the total system load but so far the system hasn't powered down as a fail-safe to protect the power supply so it looks like the 700 watt unit is working okay for now again i would probably recommend 750 if you were running a configuration with these specs uh but that being said we're eating about six gigs of vram and our cpu is hovering at around 73 degrees celsius the hottest i've seen it get so far is about 80 c on the gpu it hasn't really passed 7475c uh but the cpu did hit adc i think we were in a cinematic at some point and it did get a little toasty um it's actually kind of surprising how warm the cpu is getting considering that it's at a much lower load than the gpu you can see we're only hovering at around 30 to 40 percent uh sometimes lower than that um i think this is just attributed to the fact that we have a ryzen 9 3900x in here and the fans are set to exhaust which means that they're actually sucking up all the heat coming off of the graphics card maybe not all of it but definitely a good chunk of it before it's actually passing through the fin stack in the radiator so that could be heating things up i'd be very curious to see how temps would be if we flip those fans around to intake pulling fresh air from the bottom there's not a whole lot of room at the bottom of the case for airflow though so i can't imagine that it would be much better there's probably only about a centimeter or so of clearance between uh the desk that the the system's on and the actual bottom of the case so i can't imagine that would do much maybe if we elevated the the case off of the feet a little bit more to provide some more airflow but hard to say for now overall though these are totally acceptable temperatures especially on the gpu i'm very surprised at how low it is considering this is a founder's edition card i was a little bit nervous at first that our rear-facing fan on the gpu would still be choked for airflow even though we are using those 20 millimeter standoffs but it seems okay and this is of course without oh we just hit 83c on the cpu it's gel toasty there get a little toasty but bear in mind this is without any fan tuning on the aio fans on the radiator fans and in the case like this a small form factor case it's very common uh to undervolt your cpu so that you can get those lower temperatures uh sometimes you get some insane results like you can drop the cpu temps by 10 degrees or more without really incurring that much performance loss when it comes to frame rate especially in the game like this where it's more heavily gpu bound than anything if this was my personal build i'd definitely try flipping the uh the radiator fans oh and i'm about to get shot damn i'm making a bit you sons a bit uh anyway i would try flipping the radiator fans um for one i would definitely tune the fans uh to get a nice sweet spot between acoustics and uh and thermals and finally i would certainly undervolt the cpu because it's just getting a little too toasty for my liking as is on the gpu side of things i don't think i would change a thing um for a 3080 ti i don't really see any much point in overclocking it especially because we're not it's really not getting any uh sort of intake for it whatsoever i mean the intake is just straight from the side of the side of the case it's getting it directly through the ventilation on the side panel but there's no actual fans in this case that's blowing fresh air towards the graphics card so i would probably just leave that alone i don't think there's any need to undervolt the gpu though unlike the cpu just because the temperatures are just fine they're looking really good but yeah at the end of the day i really think this a4 h2o case is a huge step over the original dan case a4 uh simply because you just with that original case you would not be able to squeeze this level of power inside of such a small chassis uh there's no way you could get uh certainly not an rtx 3080 or any 3000 series founders edition card in there because that again that rear fan would just be completely choked off so i really appreciate the flexibility that this case offers over the original and there's absolutely no way in hell i could ever cram a ryzen 9 5 900 x 12 core processor inside of the original dan case without shooting brakes i mean there's just absolutely no way that's sustainable on a 90 millimeter radiator just impossible but in this case while the temperatures on the cpu do tend to get a little bit too high for my liking there's certainly room to to tweak that and you can certainly bring those temperatures down by doing a number of those things that i suggested like overvolting or i'm sorry undervolting for example the end result is a very tiny but very fast pc uh as you can see at 1440p at red dead redemption we're pretty much on ultra settings with dlss on balanced mode we're still getting over 100 fps on average which is pretty fantastic for a demanding game like this as for acoustics the system is staying much quieter than i expected it to it's still under full load running the same game um and i'll lean in so you can hear it on my mic mike's right here i'll back away this is ambient noise in the room and this is how it sounds from a more i guess realistic distance if i were playing a game right now it's a very scientific test going into this review i had a feeling that this case was going to be a huge upgrade over the original dan case a4 and i still stand by that opinion i i think it's a huge upgrade mainly because of the additional hardware support and honestly the the extra space that it takes up over the original case i think it's well worth it uh considering how much more hardware you can cram into here and how much better cooling you can get as well uh particularly with your cpu so oh also just i gotta shout out again the price drop thank you liam lee and then case for dropping the price on this case and making it more competitive i think it makes it a very compelling option for people who are looking to cram a lot of power into a very little space but you guys let me know what you think if you like this video toss a like on it before you go get subscribe for more tech content on the way and i will see you guys in the next video\n"